TY - JOUR
AU - Grossman,Gene M.
AU - Helpman,Elhanan
TI - Separation of Powers and the Budget Process
JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL - No. 12332
PY - 2006
Y2 - June 2006
DO - 10.3386/w12332
UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12332
L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12332.pdf
N1 - Author contact info:
Gene M. Grossman
International Economics Section
Department of Economics
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
Tel: 609/258-4823
Fax: 609/258-1374
E-Mail: grossman@princeton.edu
Elhanan Helpman
Department of Economics
Harvard University
1875 Cambridge Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617-495-4690
Fax: 617-495-7730
E-Mail: ehelpman@harvard.edu
AB - We study budget formation in a model featuring separation of powers. In our model, the legislature designs a budget bill that can include a cap on total spending and earmarked allocations to designated public projects. Each project provides random benefits to one of many interest groups. The legislature can delegate spending decisions to the executive, who can observe the productivity of all projects before choosing which to fund. However, the ruling coalition in the legislature and the executive serve different constituencies, so their interests are not perfectly aligned. We consider settings that differ in terms of the breadth and overlap in the constituencies of the two branches, and associate these with the political systems and circumstances under which they most naturally arise. Earmarks are more likely to occur when the executive serves broad interests, while a binding budget cap arises when the executive%u2019s constituency is more narrow than that of the powerful legislators.
ER -